My work depicts scenes of nature as a metaphor for our internal world in a state of transience.

We can see ourselves in its vastness and depths, its calm and its torrents. Nature reflects back to us our inner worlds and emotions.

Using a mixed media approach to image making, I combine acrylic paint and C-print photographs. By layering these elements I can etch down into the emulsion of the photograph to reveal golden hues and also build up the surface with impasto and washes of colour. The result is an image with photo sharp detail in focal areas and painterly brush marks that obscure and create space for the imagination.

I'm a Canadian artist with work featured internationally in galleries, art fairs, magazines, tv programs and many private collections. I am based in Toronto, Canada and work with a great team of galleries across Canada and US that exhibit and sell my work to clients around the world.

Steven Nederveen

I've grown up with, and adopted for myself, a wonderful ease and enjoyment from nature walks and spending time on the water. The feelings of being grounded and expansive on these outings are so rich that it's easy to make spiritual associations to it. This latest series of paintings are largely about the mystical energy of nature and revealing of a hidden magical world.

I've made many of the landscape scenes less about location and more about the boundaries between reality and dream. In a way, I also try to capture the emotional memory of a place instead of a documentary style image. This allows for a scene to be coloured by my experience, highlighting some features while others fade away or meld into some other vague memory. In the way that our minds can fuse together different memories into one event, I've made most of my landscapes from different views along the journey, adding a path here, removing trees there. 

Hey, Fellow Dreamers...

Wonder where it all began? Here's me in my New York studio back in 2001. Eating chick peas from a can, showering at the Y, and nurturing my creative vision. Just look at how earnestly I'm writing in my sketchbook... awwwww baby artist.

The romanticized image of the starving artist paying their dues was in full effect. I thought this was the path to stardom but honestly it was rough. The rats, the break-ins and the uncertainty were hard, but hey, I was young and living it up in New York. The museums, cool art shows, great after-parties and an amazing group of friends supporting each other made the lows more bearable. I found myself leaving the city more and more, taking the Q Line out to Rockaway Beach so I could watch the surfers and feel the Atlantic air on my face. Eventually I felt the need to stay closer to my source of inspiration and came home to the vast wilderness of Canada.

I'm still painting from that same source of inspiration today.

This studio was in an old factory building called Crane Street Studios that housed hundreds of artists. The building itself was a graffiti mural mecca where artists from around the world came to paint the walls.

You can see the early stages of my current forest pieces here.

If that orange piece was flipped, I'd be pretty close to some of my current ocean pieces.

Looking very adult in my home studio in Toronto.

These three piece made recently definitely have their roots in my old New York 2001 pieces.

Life today with my favourite people (and dog).

A special shout out to Bau-Xi Gallery! They have represented my work for the last 13 years and given me 18 solo shows between Toronto and Vancouver. Forever grateful for this wonderful team!